Climate Disaster Approaches and Feckless Politicians Do Nothing

As much of America is gripped in a heat wave which portends things to come and Europe and other parts of the world are experiencing record heat, Republicans in Washington and Senator Joe Manchin, a supposed Democrat, have opted to do nothing, with Manchin disingenuously worrying about inflation when in reality many believe he is more concerned with his personal investments and keeping oil and coal company revenues high.   Meanwhile, the extremist majority on the Supreme Court gutted the EPA's ability to combat carbon emmissions.   A piece in the New York Times aptly describes the climate crisis:

The evidence that a climate crisis is well underway appears to be everywhere: the Great Salt Lake in Utah drying up, severe weather regularly imperiling the electric grid in Texas, wildfires scorching the drought-plagued West, “climate refugees” seeking higher land in Louisiana and tidal floods swamping the streets of Miami.

In 2020, Mr. Biden campaigned on a transformative, $2 trillion program to wean the nation from fossil fuels.

By this week, what remained of that program — mainly clean energy tax breaks and subsidies to purchase electric vehicles — appeared dead, killed by Mr. Manchin, who fretted that it could exacerbate inflation. The bipartisan infrastructure bill signed by Mr. Biden did include $2.5 billion to help communities install charging stations, but consumers appeared to be on the hook for the full cost of the cars and trucks that need the juice.

Much of Democrats’ frustration surrounding Congress’s climate failures has been directed not toward Republicans, but toward Mr. Manchin, who said repeatedly that even a stripped-down budget bill should address the issue — only to pull the plug last week on any climate provisions.

We are quickly passing the point of no return and as a piece in The Atlantic lays out, we may soon learn that worse case senarios will be arriving far sooner than previously predicted.  Here are highlights:

In September 2020, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office published a hypothetical weather forecast for a mid-July day in the year 2050. Forty degrees Celsius in London. (That’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit.) Thirty-eight in Hull (100 degrees F). Thirty-nine in Birmingham (102 degrees F). These were preposterous numbers, never before seen in U.K. weather forecasts, much less felt in reality—until last week. On Friday, the Met Office published an actual forecast for Tuesday that, as several observers noted, looked scarily similar to its 2050 projections. And today, as predicted, the U.K. smashed its previous heat record, registering a provisional reading of 40.3 degrees C, or 104.5 degrees F, in a small village near the eastern coast. From speculative fiction to nonfiction in less than two years.

It’s not just the U.K. Now everywhere is hot. More than 100 million Americans are currently under heat advisories or warnings. In India, a record-breaking heat wave has only recently given way to the monsoon. Parts of Central Asia are still seeing temperatures as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit. And the damage done by overlapping disasters doesn’t merely accrete linearly; it compounds. Over time, climate change has made these concurrent extremes more and more common, Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist at Columbia, told me. Since the late ’70s, concurrent major heat waves have grown six times more frequent in the Northern Hemi sphere, . . . .

There is also the possibility, Kornhuber said, that beyond simply warming the planet as a whole, climate change could be changing the way weather systems move around the globe, so as to make concurrent heat waves more likely. Under one hypothesis, the rapid warming of the poles compresses the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. This, in turn, slows the equatorial jet stream (which you can basically think of as the giant wind highway along which lots of weather travels), causing heat waves to linger longer than they otherwise would.

At some level, the mechanics don’t really matter. Whatever they are, the story is this: Heat waves are getting hotter and longer and more frequent, and that is very bad news indeed. For anyone who aspires to be alive for several more decades, “the simple laws of physics mean this will likely be one of the cooler summers of our lifetime,” Daniel Horton, a climate scientist at Northwestern University, told me.

In a scenario in which we limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we could expect to see a heat wave that would have occurred once every 50 years in the late 1800s climate happen about nine times as often. That scenario is pretty much already an optimistic fantasy. In the worst-case scenario the report considered, we would see a once-every-50-years heat wave 40 out of every 50 years. . . . . those new extremes could approach 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than they are at present.

More than 1,700 heat-related deaths have been reported this month in Spain and Portugal alone. Runways are melting and delaying planes. Tracks are warping and delaying trains. Surgical procedures are being canceled because of overheated operating rooms. Also, sharks.

When we note the eerie resemblance between this week’s U.K. weather forecast and the hypothetical 2050 forecast published two years earlier and say that the current heat wave is a glimpse of the future, we are in a way eliding the real question. Which is: What part of the future are we glimpsing? A true outlier? Or a pretty hot summer? Or four years out of every five? “The answer,” Ruane said, “is, it depends on what we as a society choose to do.”  That could be heartening. But the way things are going, it’s not very heartening at all.

Be very afraid for the future.